


I hate you

by anythingbutgrief



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Angst, Family, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 22:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1280794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrief/pseuds/anythingbutgrief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t a lie. Mickey had spent a lifetime lying and he knew what it felt like, knew the shape and the texture and the taste of a lie on his tongue. But it wasn’t the whole truth either, and that was what made him sick, made him want to throw up things permanently lodged inside him, things that he’d probably been born with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I hate you

**Author's Note:**

> Included are mentions of abuse and rape, but not in graphic detail.

Mickey was five years old, sailing up through the air, arms outreached to scrape the ceiling with his fingertips. Mickey did not doubt, even for a second, that he would be caught when his body fell back down. His father waited, arms open, hands huge against Mickey’s body when gravity took over. The millisecond he was still in his father’s grasp, he could smell something thick and warm and welcoming on his father’s breath, musky like the wood table they used to have in the living room a few months ago, before it got smashed to bits that one night. Mickey couldn’t remember what happened there, knew it happened after his mother and father yelling and before some quiet sobbing noises, but the smell, the smell was what he liked to think of instead. Mickey smiled at the smell, and then his father tossed him up again, that deeper tone of laughter mixing with Mickey’s higher pitch.

“Terry, for God’s sake, you’re gonna smash his head in!”

At the sound of the voice, Mickey’s mom’s voice, Terry rolled his eyes but placed Mickey back on the ground, a little too firmly.

“Are you drunk already?” his mom asked, voice tense but not raised. Terry grunted in acknowledgement and shoved past her into the hall, knocking her shoulder with his on his way past.

“You have to do that in front of him?” his mother hissed at Terry’s back, but he didn’t answer, so she turned back to Mickey.

“I wanted to touch the ceiling, though,” Mickey muttered, eyes glued to the floor. He didn’t look up until his mother pointed his chin upward with her thumb and first finger, smiling at his pout. “You’ll get there eventually, baby. One day you’ll be big and strong.” His mother was wrong. He would never be big. But he’d become the other thing soon enough.

Mickey was twenty years old, standing above his father’s coffin, body buzzing with the whiskey he’d split with his sister before, his breath tasting like what his dad’s did fifteen years earlier. When Mandy finally spoke, her voice wasn’t slurred, wasn’t sobbing out the words, wasn’t stuttering or unsure or unclear. Wasn’t vicious or biting. Wasn’t even numb. Just steady. “You wanna know the truth? I never loved him at all.”

Mickey wished he could say the same.

***

Mickey was nineteen years old, sitting next to a drunk redhead who spat out, “Sometimes I think. Sometimes I think I never loved you at all. Like I dreamed it.”

If Mickey were better at lying to himself, if he hadn’t fallen out of the habit, he would have told himself that it was the first time he’d heard those words, in any combination, in “a long, long time.” But Mickey knew better than that. It had been thirteen years, three months and some change, since he’d heard them, since a sweet voice had whispered them to him in the dark. Only now he was hearing the opposite. Mickey swallowed and willed his voice to work. “Sounds about right.”

Ian laughed, without humor, hard and hollow and hurtful. “I wish—I fucking _wish_ that were true.”

Mickey didn’t say anything, just took the bottle from Ian and swigged a mouthful, bitter and burning. Ian spoke again, lower, almost to himself: “I fucking wish that I didn’t. That I don’t. When I was away, I’d, uh, I’d sit up nights….well, I wouldn’t sit up, I’d be lying down, trying to sleep, but I couldn’t because my brain wouldn’t settle down, never fucking settles down anymore, then I’d give up and I’d just fucking pray, hard as I ever did, please make it stop, please make it stop, please, please, please. Please God, please cut him out of me. It was so fucking stupid, Mickey, it was so stupid. I cut myself out of me faster than I ever could you, it was so fucking dumb. Please, please, please, every night, please--”

“Please,” Mickey cut in. “Please, shut the fuck up.” He threw the bottle back over, and Ian brought it to his lips without looking at him.

***

“I hate Monica,” Ian announced, voice loud and confident like some town crier reading out the pertinent news.

Mickey leaned up on his elbow to look over at Ian, who still had his arms pillowed behind his head and his eyes focused on the stars above the roof. “Okay?”

“Yeah, I hate her,” Ian said again, like he was agreeing with something somebody else had brought up. “Like Frank is a pathetic loser, but I don’t hate him. I hate her, though.”

Mickey scoffed. “I sure as fuck would hate Frank if I were related to the bastard. Fuck, I hate him now.”

“Why bother? He’s like not even worth it.”

“And Monica is?”

“Yeah. No, I mean. It’s like—it’s like when she’s here, she’s _here_ , you know? And I….” Ian’s words fell off, but the grimace that twisted his face said them anyway. _I love her._

“You give a shit about her, and you don’t for Frank,” Mickey supplied instead.

“Yeah, I mean. When she’s around, she’s, like, a mom. She gives a shit, and like, acts like I matter, and so when she goes away it’s like…You know?”

A thousand words, a million, perched themselves on Mickey’s tongue, hundreds of mental pictures of his parents smiling at each other and smiling at him, dozens of moments preserved, moments of his young small body sliding carelessly through the air into his father’s arms, moments when even the sickening pull of gravity wasn’t enough to overcome the trust that’d been bred into him, not yet beaten out. “Yeah.” _I do know._

***

After the funeral, after the house had emptied out, after Mandy had fucked-off to god knows where, Mickey tried to just sit on the couch, stare off into space, do nothing and feel nothing. Moment of reflection or some such shit. But it wouldn’t take. His fingers wouldn’t stop itching, like they needed a cigarette or something, but he’d already gone through a pack today already so that couldn’t be it. He stood to his feet and paced around the room a few times, trying to get the jitters in his legs to calm down. He needed a fight or a fuck or the largest amount of alcohol he could consume without dying. The troupe of “mourners” that had drifted their way through the house that afternoon had probably already decimated the beer supply in the fridge, but it was worth checking, anyway.

Mickey already had a hand wrapped around the handle to the fridge door when he paused. A collection of time-tattered polaroids, turning yellow and brown, glossy with years of grease and misuse, still lined the top surface of the fridge. A lot of them were Mandy, Mandy in a cheap blue princess dress, Mandy grinning at the camera with her face resting in her hands, toddler Mandy with applesauce smeared across her cheeks and chin. Some were of Iggy and Joey, standing together with their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. A group picture from forever ago, when Mandy was still practically a baby in Mickey’s skinny unstable arms. One of Mickey sitting in his father’s lap, both of them waving at the camera. Mickey’s stomach turned, and he grabbed the offending artifact from the fridge, staring hard at it like he could make the faces look at him directly, make them speak to him, make them frown instead of smile, make them disappear entirely.

He tried hard to remember that specific moment, tried to remember what special occasion it must have been for his mother to whip out the camera, but nothing came. He tried to imagine the scene, tried to picture if his mother, standing on the opposite side of the room, had bruises on her arms, or if she would later that day. Mickey’s feet carried him back over to the couch, sitting him down as he stared, absorbed, back into that dead world. Had his father tossed him through the air that day, breathless with laughter? Had his father tossed him into a wall yet? Had he not yet transformed into the man who would order the heart to be fucked out of his son one cold August morning? Was he the same man who would have the balls to say to bruised, beaten Mickey later that night, voice righteous with perfect anger: “How could you do this to me? What did I do to deserve this?” Had his father always been that man?

“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” Mickey whispered. It wasn’t a lie. Mickey had spent a lifetime lying and he knew what it felt like, knew the shape and the texture and the taste of a lie on his tongue. But it wasn’t the whole truth either, and that was what made him sick, made him want to throw up things permanently lodged inside him, things that he’d probably been born with. He stuffed the picture into his pocket and leaned his head against the back of the couch, exhausted.

He knew, just by the sound of his feet as he walked toward the couch, that it was Ian approaching a while later, the weight of him familiar next to Mickey as he came to sit without speaking for several minutes.

“Why’d you have him buried?” Ian finally asked, snapping Mickey’s eyes open.

Mickey felt his own forehead wrinkle in confusion. “Uh? So as not to fuck up this place even worse with corpse smell? The fuck you think?”

Ian smiled at that, so small that it looked involuntary. Maybe it was even genuine, the first one of its kind Mickey had seen in a while. “I meant why buy a coffin? Why not just cremate the bastard?”

Mickey shrugged. “My brothers pitched in, so it wasn’t a big deal.”

Ian scratched at the side of his face, almost thoughtfully. “That’s not what I mean. You really think he deserved a headstone?”

“Gallagher—”

“You really think that piece of shit deserves to have his name anywhere?”

The taunting voices in Mickey’s head lurched their way back to full volume, _You love him, You love him, You love him, you piece of shit._ “Christ, can you not do this tonight? Just tonight, can you fucking stop?”

“All right,” Ian said in a quiet voice after a minute. Mickey’s already empty stomach gurgled almost in protest at that tone, feeling slick and slippery with fresh guilt, but he just leaned back into the couch, avoiding looking at his stupid boyfriend-not-boyfriend whatever the hell he was and his stupid, small hurt face.

“I hate this couch,” Ian said after a while.

“Yeah,” Mickey grunted back, only half paying attention.

“Can we burn it?”

“What?”

“We could push it out into the backyard and light it up. You have a gas can of some kind next to all the beer cans out front. We could do it.”

Mickey turned to look at him then, seeing him sitting upright with his hands steeped together, neatly slotted and controlled, almost like he was praying to some strict god of order, asking permission to set fire to the world. “Why?”

“You know why,” Ian said quickly before getting to his feet. And, yeah, Mickey did know why, and he knew that, on a different day, maybe, he’d be able to feel something resembling gratitude for Ian’s gentle mercy, for not saying it out loud, not talking about that day again. Mickey stood up, too, patting his pocket to check that its contents hadn’t fallen out yet. “Go get the can,” he directed Ian. “I’ll start pushing this bitch out the back way.”

The idea didn’t occur to him until the flames leapt high, higher than Ian, long and thin and imperious as they sliced into the night sky, ugly fabric turning black under their wrath. Mickey pulled the picture out and looked at it again, his tiny round smiling face and that of his father’s, both backlit orange. Mickey held it out before him, centimeters away from flame, aware that it was in the line of Ian’s sight. He heard Ian shuffle closer to him, but he didn’t say anything. Mickey looked at the picture and imagined, with all of the effort his brain could conjure, that after he threw it in, he would be numb. Purified. Cleansed of any feeling for the man, one way or the other. But it wouldn’t happen that way. He knew it wouldn’t. He would toss it in and burn with it and keep burning, always burning, just like he’d always been. Mickey stepped an inch closer, slipping one edge of the picture into the fire and feeling the heat singe his fingertips. He was aware of the burn and then, a moment later, aware of the feel of Ian’s hand firm on his shoulder, but he didn’t respond to either, busy watching faces burn to dust.

The whole thing had crumbled apart, falling away from Mickey’s burnt-cold fingertips, falling into the husk of furniture smoking under the dying fire, before he felt Ian tug on his shoulder. “Come on. Bed.”

***

“I love you,” Ian whispered later, right next to Mickey’s ear.

Mickey was sweating and panting and drained, but awake enough to hear it and awake enough to know he couldn’t get away with pretending he didn’t.

He brought a hand up to tangle in Ian’s hair, and Ian pressed back into the touch for a second before dropping, deflated, onto Mickey’s shoulder. Mickey felt Ian’s breath gradually become less frantic, his shoulders and back feeling looser under Mickey’s roaming fingertips. He pressed his face into the side of Ian’s head, hair tickling the sensitive spot under his nose. “You know. You know I—” Mickey cleared his throat and gripped a fraction tighter onto Ian’s hair. “You know—”

“Don’t say it back,” Ian murmured, voice sleepy and casual.

“Wha—What?” Mickey didn’t know whether to feel offended or terrified, didn’t know if he was asking Ian to clarify or if he was pretending that he wasn’t about to do what Ian thought.

“Just let it be about you for once,” Ian continued, snuffling into Mickey’s shoulder. “I love you. Just sit on that, okay?”

It felt like a bonfire was crackling its way to life at the pit of Mickey’s stomach, like he’d swallowed a gallon of vodka in three minutes. “Listen, you fucking—”

“Ugh, shut up,” Ian moaned, pressing his head into Mickey’s neck and kissing the skin there once, twice, three times in quick, annoyed succession. “Shut the fuck up, I love you, shut _up_.”

Mickey swallowed again, this time against the burning sensation trembling its way up and down his throat. “Okay.” His limbs shook but he clutched at Ian tighter. “Okay.”


End file.
